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Sunday, September 12, 2010

This is what Twitter is all about: yesterday evening @timtfj, @ericasipes, and I (@chrisfoley) had a lengthy conversation about orchestras, cultural elitism, government cultural support, and arts voting. We were typing away so furiously that we only realized later that we forgot to hashtag the conversation for easier retrieval. When I checked Twitter again this morning, I had discovered that several people were interested in reading the conversation in its entirety, and thanks to an eloquent search by @Eridanus, I was able to retrieve the conversation, highlights of which are below.

ericasipes: @timtfj Just heard opera American opera singer who has worked in Germany for 20 years talk about benefits of being musician there...

ericasipes: @timtfj ...quite phenomenal, really. I couldn't really even comprehend or believe it. But perhaps I shouldn't be jealous...

ericasipes: @timtfj ...I imagine there r some disadvantages 2 living in a society that supports musicians/arts, right? ;-)

timtfj: @ericasipes I do know from professional players that orchestras in Germany get far more rehearsal time than the British ones do bc of it...

timtfj: @ericasipes ... but Britain seems to be famous for good sightreading, since there's so little rehearsal time. I know I was surprised once

ericasipes: @timtfj One thing that amazed me was that each regional area has their own opera house/company. And within each house, they sometimes...

ericasipes: @timtfj ...do several productions a week, many of them premieres. Now I have 2 admit that I wouldn't necessarily b comfortable with a lot...

timtfj: @ericasipes to discover that amateur chamber musicians here seemed to have a higher standard of sightreading than someone who'd been

ericasipes: @timtfj of the far-out interpretations they do there...some of the things this singer has had 2 do is pretty unbelievable!

timtfj: @ericasipes to music coll in Germany. So the disadvantage is that they don't do as much sightreading, I think. ;-)

timtfj: @ericasipes It's interesting though. And people in those countries tend to be more clued-up in general about music.

2 comments:

Chiming in: while being able to sightread is a valuable and powerful skill, the fact that UK musicians are *forced* to be able to sightread like demons *because there's no money to pay for rehearsals* cannot be considered a positive thing. Giving musicians time to go into their programmes in depth can bring incredible benefits in terms of expression.

Also: the current economic problems clearly highlight the superiority of state arts sponsoring v. private. Look at the drastic cuts (goodbye corporate sponsors) in the US costing jobs and putting so many in such difficulty. Compare that to fewer cuts in Canada and especially Germany, where mixed state/private financing models prevail.

One of the biggest differences in arts funding in the US and Germany is that in German, programs for the young (say, 5-15) are taken very seriously.

I go to every opera company website in Germany every year looking to see if they're doing anything worth traveling for and I'm knocked out at how every house, big or small, has programs for kids, usually stuff like a shortened Magic Flute.

But there's also an entire repertoire of operas for kids that is never recorded or performed for all-adult audiences. The kids get their own rep in addition to the usual Wagner, Weber, Verdi and so forth. I've been to operas all over Germany and there's always a good % of kids in the audience, because a) opera and symphony is just another form of entertainment and b) tickets are cheap compared to British and US houses.